Category: Week 2 – Connected Learning

Learning happens all the time. I just finished watching the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer. During the show and even after, I asked my friends and family questions, looked up information online, and just wanted to know as much as I could about the legal system and the specific case in the documentary. And I learned a lot. The show sparked my interest, I connected with others, and we all shared in the learning experience. This type of learning is part of the idea of connected learning.

Connected learning is the idea that learning thrives when a person’s interests are engaged in an environment where students work with their peers towards a shared purpose which can then lead to academic success. I love the idea that students can explore their interests and work with their friends and peers to actively engage in learning. But how does the learning connect to academic subjects and lead to academic success? And what does academic success look like in these environments?

In addition to rethinking the learning environments in academic settings, we should also reconsider how students can demonstrate their learning. Connected learning reexamines how students learn, but we can’t forget about what students learn. Considering what students learn, why they should learn it, and how they should learn it should be an iterative process that is always ongoing. And learning outcomes can be helpful with the what students learn and why. Learning outcomes don’t have to be restrictive; they can guide learning and specify a destination without specifying how that destination is reached. But then how do we know if students reach that destination?

For example, one student outcome for all undergraduate engineering students is the ability to function on interdisciplinary teams (for more info, click here). This outcome does not specify how students must demonstrate this or even what exactly it means to “function” on a team. It is an end goal and is up to educators and those in charge of the curriculum to interpret. This learning outcome can be addressed in connected learning environments where students work in teams to solve problems of interest to them. What we need to change is how we assess students. Instead of traditional multiple choice tests, we can use projects and presentations and student reflections to assess students on the teamwork learning outcome.

Connected learning environments can provide students with unique and meaningful learning environments. When rethinking the learning experiences students have, we should also reconsider how students can demonstrate that learning. Both educators and students should have a general idea of where we are trying to go (the what) and why we are trying to get there. Student outcomes can still be the destination, but the journey may be different with connected learning.

The dawn of the 21^st century has brought about a plethora of changes in the world. Societies have changed, evolved and turned inside out due to the technological advances. From being trapped in one’s hometown or two thousand people the World Wide Web has opened the entire Universe for us. For me personally, I went from sitting in a classroom with wooden desks taking copious notes on paper with my teacher talking for an hour to sitting in a circle with my laptop following a discussion with my classmates and colleagues as my professor observes.

What just happened?

Granted it took many years but changes that Millennials have seen between their high school and graduate school experiences, I believe have never been so drastic for any other generation. There have been times since I graduated from college when I felt that I was on top of my game, connected to the world, engaging in everything that was cutting edge – email, chat rooms, social media, programming. As recent as last year, attending a meeting for teachers that were developing interdisciplinary courses at a private boarding school I felt I was still there – connected. Connected with my students through the classroom in person and through learning management systems – creating hybrid courses for highly driven high schoolers.

Harsh reality settled in last week though. While sitting in our first Contemporary Pedagogy class for the first time in a long time, I felt like I was disconnected. ‘Blogging’…yikes! What is that?! My thoughts for the entire world to read and comment on! Sounds intimidating.

I had to stop myself and really think about this. OK, so if I can create a hybrid course with a co-teacher and use YouTube videos, Ted Talks, journal articles from PubMed and other online libraries along with a textbook (Phew!) then I can also think about learning through other avenues that I just haven’t had the opportunity to use.

Starting the journey then I think of connected learning as an idea that incorporates literally all we have access to today and sifting that information to gain insight into a particular topic. It is not just reading or not just doing – it is reading, doing and learning through the process. It seems to be more than the sum of its parts.

This week’s readings seem to over-emphasize the role and function of blogs. In my opinion, blogs are a new form of communicating tool, just like telephones, emails, and web searching tools. These communicating tools are indeed useful and make education more efficient. For example, nowadays students can get an article on web by clicking a few keys on board, instead of going to the library and make a hard copy. However, saving time does not necessarily make one go into the right direction. It is still one’s thinking, opinion, philosophy, and reflection upon the world that determines what information one wants to acquire. A more efficient technique just makes that happen sooner.

Some scholars seem not to get the key problems of present school education. Hitchcock said: “If there is a ‘crisis’ in the humanities, it lies in how we have our public debates, rather than in their content.” In my opinion, this is opposite to the truth. Nowadays the real difficulty of the humanities is that they have NO CONTENT except political correctness. What humanistic scholars really care about is to promote so-called equality rather than pursuing truth. Such equalities could be economic, gender, ethnic, and cultural. Equality is not a bad thing, however, we must keep in mind that equality is subject to higher values such as freedom, and these two things are not same. But this will start a much more complicated topic which is not appropriate to discuss here.

Anyway, blogs can make one’s opinion much more available to the public than traditional methods, but maybe people should keep in mind that occupying more public space does not necessarily make an opinion more meaningful. Just like Campbell revealed, blog maybe is just another form of “narrate”, or story telling.

Has technology benevolently given us unprecedented access to information and other people or has it created a world of disconnected and discontented souls? The answer seems to be as complicated as human beings are: yes and no. Or, as we marriage and family therapists (MFTs) who are also social constructionists like to say, it’s “both …

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Hello, readers! I’m back today to talk about the new world I just stumbled into. the world of Connected Learning and educational blogging. Now as most of you know, I’m obsessed with finding new and exciting initiatives within teaching. I generally scour the forums and journals to find the latest and greatest in teaching. I even read the comments (I know, I know it’s like digging through garbage) to find the rare diamond amongst the throughs of coal. Well, as I was taking a new course on Contemporary Pedagogy, to learn on the cutting edge, I found myself introduced to this new concept called Connected Learning. I thought that it was worth talking about, and so I bring it to you here. Now, admittedly, upon further inspection, Connected Learning is not completely new. In fact, it’s a remixing of the digital literacies movement to incorporate the humanist, student-centered classroom. However, I believe this remixing is combining two things that were meant to be drawn together. What we are witnessing is essentially the birth of the educational PB Chocolate Swirl. I’ve got your attention now, don’t I? From what I’ve been reading and observing, Connected learning is learning that brings together all of the different aspects of a person’s life with digital tools to inspire personal learning and growth in a way that is both self-encouraging and self-motivated. That’s a powerful idea. essentially we are taking the student-centered classes of Donald Murray and Howard Gardener and using digital tools (Like Blogging) to make them available to everyone while incorporating feminist teaching ideologies and social cognitionist teaching to ensure total incorporation. If you Haven’t noticed yet, this post is an inception-style use of this theory. I’m currently using Connected Learning to Learn about Connected Learning, to use Connected Learning to teach you about connected learning in a connected learning environment (And the top keeps spinning). This is an exciting time to be jumping into all this and I believe that, as many of the articles that we are reading for week two have said, the blog is the perfect tool to start with. it incorporates much of  the ideologies and hopes of connected teaching into an easy to use format.

This being said, like with any technology or innovation, I think that it would be unwise to go forth without voicing my reservations on the subject, so here they are: Connected learning seems too big. I could be wrong, and I certainly hope I am, but right now it seems to be taking on too much. It wants to free students from the classic classroom, incorporate digital technologies, and invite communal participation and action within the lives of the students. It’s simply too much. It’s like trying to learn to swim, run, and fly all at the same time. And, that’s if others are willing to cooperate. I can’t speak for the college level, as I have not been teaching here very long, but at the high school level getting a parent to show up one night a year is considered successful. asking for complete community participation in addition to total digital emersion seems like a pipe dream. However, I’ll be the first to admit I’m a sucker for idealism and I’m ready to get behind this if others will help.

What do you think about this initiative? what are some of the limitations that you can see? Let’s talk about it in the comments.

Blogging has been a part of the digital world for as long as I can remember. However, I believe blogging is an art, the literal art of self-expression which clearly.

Statistically speaking, artists do not make up the largest part of our society, they are usually small in numbers but fierce when it comes to their self-expression. I mean, think about it, when you blog/perform, you really put yourself out there. You open yourself up to criticism, trolling and in extreme cases, ridicule. Let me tell you, not a lot of people can handle that much pressure.

However, blogging is actually performing behind your computer screen. Sure, anyone can type up a few paragraphs on word and make them public for all the world to see. It doesn’t feel like an invasion of privacy. But in fact, it is.

Some proponents of blogging will liken in to being out in society and trying to start a conversation with someone or giving your opinion on a subject in front of people you don’t know. They would have a point. However, just like everything in the digital world, the blog will never go away. It could come back to haunt you forever and ever, like a bad credit score. If you don’t like the conversation of someone you just me, you can just turn and walk away, move on to the next person. If you don’t like the opinion of someone when you are in a group, you can tune that someone out and not take notice of them. But with blogging, you have to be extremely careful. You have to be politically correct, you have to be an excellent writer and most of all, and you must have something interesting to tell other people. And come on, let’s be frank. No one can be interesting and novel all the time. So instead of blogging, and unless you are fighting for social equality or speaking up against abuse or such, I honestly don’t want to read about your day, EVERYDAY.

Connected Learning, which connects interests, peer culture, and academic success, is a model of education that is truly appropriate for the early 21st century.  As we discussed in class on Wednesday night, education has become a process of measuring “outcomes.” Perhaps it has always been this way, but now that we have all seen how technology can transform education into so much more, this traditional view has come under criticism. The abundance of information and the ease of accessing that information allows us reexamine the purpose of education; if it is no longer a challenge to obtain knowledge, then we can ask ourselves- what can we do with all of the knowledge that we have? What was the purpose of learning it in the first place? In the day-to-day grind and the policy making of education, these questions seem to get lost, or obscured by the pressing needs of passing the next test. This brings us to another topic we discussed in class- how institutions can sometimes be slow to change, even when many people want to change them.

Part of the appeal of academia, however, is the hope of being able to rise above some of that institutional sluggishness. That is the main reason why, for me, teaching college is much more appealing than teaching high school. From my viewpoint, a teacher of a college course has more power to implement his or her vision for the purpose of the course, while a high school teacher faces more constraints. This brings the conversation back to me, and the rest of the students in contemporary pedagogy, as we begin our journeys into teaching careers. My hope for this class is that it will help me to develop my own ideas for the purpose of education in general, and economics education in particular, and how I can use Connected Learning to implement those ideas.

A good starting point here is the idea brought forth by Scott Rosenberg in his article “How Blogs Changed Everything” of human creativity being “like a gene that will turn on given the right cues.” If human creativity is the key to solving the world’s problems, and I believe that it is, then the purpose of education should be to spark this creativity. Connected Learning provides an abundance of potential “cues,” as well as the opportunity for learning to occur once the creativity gene has been “turned on.” Right now it is Thursday afternoon and I am sitting in my living room, excited about the upcoming snowstorm. I have never been very interested in learning about how weather predictions are made, but this week my curiosity has been piqued, as I hear vastly different estimates for the total snowfall we will receive. The “cue” here in sparking that interest was a feeling of snow-deprivation after living in Virginia too long (I am from Massachusetts) combined with the discovery that there are many different models of weather prediction. Thanks to facebook posts by knowledgeable friends, websites, and weather blogs, I will be able to fuel that spark of interest with information all evening if I want to. In other words, the possibility of Connected Learning provides me with more opportunities to learn about something that interests me than I could hope to take advantage of.

As a researcher, I believe it is my responsibility to add to this network of knowledge. I agree with Tim Hitchcock, who argues in his blog post “Twitter and blogs are not just add-ons to academic research, but a simple reflection of the passion underpinning it” that public conversations should be a central part of an academic’s work. I want my research to be applicable to problems, and to spark ideas that others may have.

As a teacher, I hope to keep in mind what the purpose of my course is,  and to use the framework of Connected Learning to spark student’s interests and creativity. Gardner Campbell’s article “Narrate, Curate, Share: How Blogging Can Catalyze Learning” points out that putting what you have learned into your own words, like you do when blogging,  reinforces learning.  I have noticed in my own learning that information really only sticks when I have put it into my own words, when I can reproduce it on my own, even if only in my head. I hope therefore that as an instructor, I can create assignments and environments which encourage students to do this.

Thinking about the potential power of Connected Learning in education has forced me to think theoretically about the purpose of learning and how that purpose can be fulfilled. It has also opened my mind to practical tools that can be used to connect students with knowledge and, more importantly, inspiration.